Crimson Lake

by Candice Fox

  ‘You’re also wasting my time if you’re here trying to investigate Jake’s death.’ Ormund wiped his nose on the back of his hand, making the mask rise slightly into his fluffy hair. ‘Jake isn’t dead. He left all his things behind, and he’s in hiding.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Amanda said. ‘Well, that’s interesting. Do you, ah … Do you know where he is? Because a pathologist in Cairns has got one of his hip bones and we’re thinking he might like it back.’

  I reached over and took the mouse from Amanda, launched her screen video program and clicked the ‘record’ icon at the bottom of the screen. Ormund laughed, adjusted his mask.

  ‘If you think that’s really Jake’s bone, it mightn’t even be worth continuing this conversation, because apparently you’ve got your head stuck in the sand.’ Ormund sighed dramatically, looking away from the screen, bored. ‘I haven’t got the time to explain the whole thing to you.’

  Amanda muted the microphone and turned to me.

  ‘It must be exhausting to be this narcissistic,’ she said. ‘I’m nowhere near this narcissistic, am I?’

  I smiled. She clicked the microphone back on.

  ‘I’m a very busy person,’ Ormund continued. ‘If you’d bothered to read any of the hundreds of articles I’ve written about the Last Light Chronicles and the Australian government, you’d have some idea of what’s really going on.’

  Amanda clicked the microphone off. ‘It’s always the bloody government with these people,’ she said. She clicked it back on again.

  ‘Look, Ted and I are very concerned about Jake,’ Amanda told Ormund. ‘We really like the guy. Ted here’s a big fan of the books, aren’t you, Ted?’ She slapped my chest. ‘He’s been crying into his beard for weeks, wondering what the hell happened. Why don’t you fill us two idiots in on what’s really going on.’

  Ormund sighed dramatically again. Behind him, I could see a set of concrete stairs ascending above a row of shelves. Someone walked across the doorway and back again, and I heard a fridge door slam. Probably the guy’s mother. I took an inventory of the room. Tools. Boxes. Rows of Xbox games. It was definitely a basement. This guy was the former clichéd oily teen who’d now grown roots into his parents’ house, a boy-man his parents would only be rid of when they stopped paying for his gaming subscriptions. It might have been funny if it wasn’t so frighteningly similar to the stories of some very dangerous people who’d also been obsessed with the government, conspiracies, the end of the world. I thought about Anders Breivik in Norway, the mother who had grieved for him when he was hauled away to prison.

  ‘People think Jake started signalling the end of days in the Last Light Chronicles, but the truth is, he was writing about it long before that,’ Ormund said. ‘All of his early writings are online, and most people disregard their importance because as a writer he was just finding his feet.’

  ‘Vampire porn,’ Amanda laughed. ‘Wasn’t he writing vampire porn?’

  ‘Urgh.’ Ormund slapped the mask over his eyes. ‘See, this is why I don’t talk to people like you. Gothic fiction began some of the most cherished erotic conventions in modern literature. Do you even read?’

  ‘So Jake was signalling the beginning of the end back then, too,’ I cut in, before Amanda lost us all the cooperation Ormund was willing to give.

  ‘He was trying to find a way to tell people that society is going to fall,’ Ormund said. ‘If you’d done any of your homework, you’d know Jake’s father was Assistant Deputy Director of Operations for the Office of National Assessments. They work closely with ASIO.’

  ‘Spies!’ Amanda clapped.

  ‘Jesus, you’re an idiot,’ Ormund said. ‘He wasn’t working with spies. He was working in national security. He found out that things are coming to an end, and when he tried to bring Jake into the business, Jake learned it too. He wanted to warn everyone.’

  ‘So why didn’t he just put it out there plainly?’ Amanda asked. ‘Grab a megaphone. Attention, everyone! The end is nigh! ’

  ‘How has that worked out for other people who have done that?’ Ormund asked, his head tilted curiously.

  ‘Not, uh … not very well.’

  ‘Jake didn’t want to be seen as crazy, and he also didn’t want to be disappeared for exposing government secrets.’

  ‘So he put it in fiction,’ I said. ‘So that only the cleverest readers would be able to figure it out.’

  ‘The biblical references are like clues,’ Ormund said. ‘They tell us when the end will come, how, and what we can do if we want to survive it.’

  ‘And what do they say?’ Amanda asked. ‘How can we survive it?’

  Ormund laughed. ‘I don’t think fools like you deserve to know.’

  Amanda looked at me, chewing her lips to prevent them from stretching into a smile.

  ‘Towards the end of the Last Light Chronicles, Jake talks about a dark thing pursuing him,’ Ormund said. ‘He writes about feeling haunted.’

  ‘We noticed that too!’ Amanda held up her hand for a high-five. I reciprocated begrudgingly.

  ‘Jake knew he’d pissed off enough people with the Chronicles. His warnings about the end of days were becoming more and more blatant, until he was forced into hiding. The truth is, Jake was trying to give us a chance. He wanted to make sure only the right people would be able to decipher the code in his works and make it to the next world. And if you aren’t capable of that, I’m not going to give you a free ticket in. Jake is a good man. He’s likely shared what he knows with some people who really don’t deserve it. His pathetic, loser agent and his ridiculous family. When the end comes, only those who can really be trusted should be prepared.’

  ‘All right then,’ Amanda sighed. ‘You don’t have to tell us the secret password to the spaceship to the new world. Just tell us where Jake’s hiding. Because we’ve been hired to do a job, and we need to get paid.’

  Ormund snorted in disgust and reached towards the screen. He slammed his laptop closed, and the chat window went blank.

  ‘That,’ Amanda said, ‘was some crazy shit.’

  ‘Very entertaining.’

  ‘You said it, mate!’

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked. ‘Anything there?’

  ‘Well, we know he has a rage problem,’ she mused. ‘And he’s deeper into Jake than anyone we’ve met so far. I’m not ruling him out. Maybe he met Jake, confronted him with all these wild accusations about the end of days and government conspiracies and Jake ruined his little fantasy by telling him what we’re both thinking – that he’s a dick and he’s wrong about everything. Maybe his great messiah Jake Scully just turned out to be some dude who writes stories and not the key to Ormund’s dream.’

  ‘Ormund didn’t say anything about Jake being gay, either,’ I noted. ‘If he’s trying to prove to us fools that he knows what Jake was really up to, what he was really like, why didn’t he mention Jake’s biggest secret?’

  ‘Either he doesn’t know,’ Amanda said, ‘or he’s not happy about it. Thinks it’s a lie planted by the government. Like the hip bone.’

  ‘I’d be interested to see this earlier writing of Jake’s,’ I said. ‘Ormund said it was all available online.’

  Amanda started scouring the internet, looking for Jake’s works. My phone rang in my pocket, a number I didn’t recognise.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Mr Collins,’ a voice said. ‘This is Eleanor Chapman.’

  I coughed. Amanda looked at me.

  ‘Oh, hi! Hi.’

  ‘You sent me an email asking about my book, Murder in the Top End.’

  ‘I did,’ I said. ‘Let me just get somewhere more private.’

  I held my hand over the phone and mouthed ‘my lawyer’ to Amanda. Forgetting my terror of being out in the open while the Australian media bandied my photograph about, I went out the front door and stood in the street.

  ‘What’s your interest in the case?’ Eleanor asked. ‘No one has contacted me in a long time.’


  ‘Oh, I’m a fellow true crime author. I’m working on a … um … a compilation book of young Australian killers? It’s my first work. I’m thinking I’m going to feature the Lauren Freeman murder in one of the first chapters. Your book is very good. It’s been very helpful.’

  ‘Well, thank you.’ Eleanor laughed. ‘The book did very well. It’s a good story.’

  ‘Really chilling.’ I glanced inside the glass panel in the door to see Amanda at the computer. ‘What’s that they say? Every parent’s worst nightmare?’

  ‘Some of the detectives who worked on that case ended up leaving the force,’ Eleanor said, sighing. ‘Couldn’t handle it.’

  ‘I bet.’

  ‘So what specifically can I help you with?’

  ‘Well, look, I’m sort of hoping to start each chapter with a breakdown of the victim and what they were like,’ I said. ‘You’ve got a bit about Lauren in the book but there are still some things I don’t know about her.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Eleanor said, ‘that was my only regret about that work. There was only so much I could get. The closer you write a true crime book to the time of the murder, the better it’ll sell – but the harder it is to get anyone to talk to you. The victim’s family is all choked up and the killer’s family is still scrounging around for a narrative they can live with.’

  ‘There wasn’t much in the book about Amanda’s family, either,’ I said.

  ‘Not much to tell there. Daddy was a loudmouth drunk covered in tattoos who had almost nothing to do with the family. Died of a heart attack when Amanda was six. Mother completely shut up shop after the murder. Gave a very colourless, brief character witness statement at the hearing through her lawyer. Amanda pled guilty straight away, as you know, so there wasn’t so much a trial as a series of committal and plea hearings. But a good testimony by Mum in person might have knocked a few years off the sentence.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think mummy and daughter were ever that close. Amanda was always a bit of a wanderer. Free spirit. You couldn’t pull her down from the clouds.’

  ‘A bit strange that she would be such close friends with Lauren Freeman, then,’ I said. ‘I’ve visited the Freemans and they seem very buttoned-up.’

  ‘Oh, they are,’ Eleanor said. ‘They were, at least. Lauren was that typical girl-next-door. If she’d been American she would have been captain of the cheerleading team. Prefect in primary school. Teacher’s pet. She had such opportunity ahead of her. Her sister was absolutely crushed by the death. Dianne, was it?’

  ‘Dynah.’

  ‘I think there might have been some tension there, little-sister jealousy. The two girls had some roaring fight the week before the murder and Dynah had scratched Lauren on the face. When the wound had to be accounted for in the autopsy findings, and the mother had to ask Dynah if that’s what had truly happened, the girl just broke down. I was there, doing interviews. It was one of the most awful things I’ve ever seen. Kids. They do stupid things. She probably still regrets it to this day.’

  ‘So, uh.’ I chewed my lips, trying to think how best to word my inquiry. ‘Look, you just mentioned Lauren would have been a cheerleader in the US … I mean, I’ve watched a lot of these true crime documentaries and when the cheerleader gets killed they always find she’s got some kind of dark secret … I hope I’m not being disrespectful here. You know, how she’s always got a secret drug habit, or she’s a bit too flirty with the English teacher …’

  ‘I think I know what you’re getting at.’ Eleanor laughed.

  ‘Was there anything you didn’t mention in the book that you found out at the time? Anything that might have been best left unrevealed – things being so tense and all?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ she said. ‘Believe me, I dug around. I would have loved for this thing to have been more than just a freak accident, some psycho goth kid going nuts. But Lauren was just an angel. She was a genuinely good kid.’

  ‘And you still stand by that reasoning for the murder?’ I said. ‘That it was just a psycho goth kid going nuts?’

  ‘I do,’ she said. ‘I took one look at Amanda Pharrell at her first hearing. I knew there was nothing in there. She was cold as ice. Lauren tried to do a good thing, to bring this little weirdo kid to a party she would never have been invited to otherwise, and Amanda just snapped.’

  I looked in the window at Amanda again. She was patting one of the fat cats with her bare foot.

  ‘I’m a bit confused about the murder weapon,’ I said. ‘In the book, you go through the autopsy report and you say that it was probably a ten-or twelve-centimetre pocket knife. Did you ever find out where that knife came from? Did anyone ever ask why it wasn’t found at the crime scene?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m afraid I’m going to have to go, Mr Collins. I’ve got a meeting I’ve got to prepare for very soon.’

  ‘They searched the bush for the knife with metal detectors and never found it,’ I continued. ‘I mean, what did she do with it?’

  ‘Email me through any other questions you have, and I’ll try to answer them as best I can,’ Eleanor said. I heard the sound of a car door in the background of the call. She paused, thinking. ‘I think I might have some old photos somewhere, some pictures that didn’t make it into the book. There aren’t any more of Amanda, but there are some of Lauren. I mean, you’re not planning to speak to Amanda herself for this project, are you?’

  ‘Umm. I hadn’t decided yet.’

  ‘Don’t. If I can offer you any advice at all, it’s that you shouldn’t bother. She’s a master manipulator, that one. She’ll just mess with your head and it’ll only ruin the integrity of the work. Stay away from Amanda Pharrell.’

  I felt a zing of pain through my chest. I was remembering something from days earlier, the very words vibrating through my ear canals, shaking loose a vision of myself on my back in the alleyway in Cairns. Lou Damford was standing over me, a handful of my shirt in his hand, his feet on either side of my chest. I remember his fist in the air, caught in the hot white light of the sun.

  Stay away from Amanda Pharrell, he’d said.

  Dear Jake,

  You had yourself a nice little self-examination session this morning, didn’t you? From the steep rise at the side of the house, if you clamber onto the big rock there, you can see right into the ensuite window. You probably didn’t worry about this too much when you designed the house, did you? Who would take the trouble to cut through the rainforest off Danbury Road, following the lights in the dark like gold beacons? Who would risk losing their whole foot in the soft, wet soil, to be scraped by lush prickly leaves and rained upon by dew from the canopies to catch a glimpse of Jake Scully at the full-length mirror, combing his hair back, looking into his own eyes? I watched you there this morning, tilting back your head and searching beneath your jawline for imperfections, plucking at the fine hairs between your dark brows, turning and trying to decide if you are fatter than when Stella married you, if all that sitting around clattering at the keys has made you soft.

  Of course, you’re not fatter. You keep yourself beautiful not only for your wife but for your occasional lovers. Yes, I know about Ray. I know about the boys you pick up in clubs when you can make it down to Melbourne and Sydney. I watched you this morning running your fingers down your taut belly and into the dark hairs around your cock and I wondered if you were thinking about those young men while your wife slept in the other room. I first got a hint of your other tastes watching you in the downstairs office, when you flicked over after the tiny black words stopped crawling across the screen so you could watch men fuck for a while like some blank-faced supervisor.

  It’s getting harder and harder not to spend all my time watching you. Just like when I read your books, you take me away, even when you don’t know you’re doing it. I watch you write. I watch you shower. I watch you fuck your wife. I’ve stood in your presence while you sleep. I’ve sat in your chair behind your big bad desk and pretended to be you
. I’ve touched you through your things. I’m the ghost that haunts you.

  I watch you open letters from fans. As I suspected, you hardly see them. You’ve only got eyes for yourself.

  I’m a dark satellite orbiting you, my golden, warm sun. I can only be seen when you shadow me. You grow cold for a second, and you look out.

  Hi there, beauty.

  I left Amanda trying to find Jake Scully’s original works online. Most of the places that hosted the stories were membership-only fan clubs that seemed very selective about who they let into their group. It seemed we’d have to wait until the hosts, who were all in the United States, woke up and went online to see if we could make it in. Amanda sat creating profiles for herself, and sometimes me, if the group was mostly male-looking avatars. She’d profess her undying love and admiration of Jake, and even hint now and then that she didn’t believe he was dead, before sending her messages off.

  I, on the other hand, was completely useless. I sat trying not to google myself on my phone, and every now and then relenting and looking at images and headlines before quickly closing them again. Pictures of me and Dynah were already hitting the likes of the Daily Mail and news.com.au. They’d blurred Dynah’s image, thankfully. The journalist who’d caught me at the bus stop must have approached her and questioned her, but the blurred face meant she hadn’t allowed him permission to use her image. It probably meant that she now knew who I was, however. At least Amanda, if she went online, wouldn’t see me with the sister of her murder victim.

  Battered and bruised Conkaffey back on the prowl, one headline read.

  Bus-stop accused hunts blondes in Far North.

  I scrutinised the image of myself. My face was only in profile, and with the black eye and swollen bottom lip it was possible Stella Scully wouldn’t recognise me. But if Harrison saw the article, he’d likely make the connection between the old-man paedophile his girlfriend and her friends had been harassing, and the questions I’d asked him on his way to school. In time I became too restless and lied to Amanda, told her I’d do a round trip and check out Ormund Smitt’s home address, see if I could chat to the kid face to face. His home address was easy enough for Amanda to track down with the limited databases she’d been allowed into as a licensed private detective. I felt some of the dread lift as I slid into my car. If I was moving, surely the vigilantes, angry townspeople and rabid journalists would find me harder to catch.